Thursday, June 05, 2014

I spent most of my gardening time last week doing border
patrol – culling out the invading
perennial plants that have crossed from the portion of the flowerbed to which
they have been assigned into the space that we have allocated for their
neighbor. It’s a never-ending activity
with which I have willingly burdened myself in order to have a series of
gardens that are filled to the brim with closely cramped, but never
overcrowded, variously colored flora. To
borrow a phrase from Mars’ high school part-time employment as a waitress at
national ice cream restaurant chain, we want our resident blossoms to be
“friendly, but not familiar”.

So it was
absolutely appropriate that Mars and I were walking in New Britain, CT’s Walnut Hill Park
the other day – the place where I first learned the profound joy of lacerating
the landscape in the pursuit of an aesthetic environment.

This large
public area was designed in the 1870s by Frederick Law Olmstead and is included
on the National Register of Historic Places.
Over the years Mars and I have been to several other public areas and
cemeteries that purport to have been designed by the “Father of American
Landscape Architecture – much like bedrooms in which George Washington has
slept. But Walnut Hill Park actually
has a signed copy of the original plan to prove it.

The drawing
contains a wading pool with a small fountain that I remember playing in as a
young boy growing up in this city.
(Though not a New Britain-ite Mars claims to have also “swum” in these
waters and recalls attempting to drown a tall, thin kid that she found really
annoying. I have no such
recollection.)

That water
feature is no longer there – at least partially as a result of the Polio scare of
the 1950s and the public’s wholesale avoidance of public areas wherein the
disease could be spread. I am sure there
were other more fiduciary reasons also.

The original
diagram also contains lots of carefully laid out trees and several open
fields. Yet somehow, 90 years after its
creation, at least a portion of the actual park had been lost to a wide variety
of invasive plants, bushes, and tall grasses, which made useful navigation of
these areas impossible and the overall appearance decidedly non-Olmsteadian.

So, who you
gonna call? Shrub Busters! – or in this case a bunch of untrained teenage boys
including myself, unable to differentiate between a weed and a cultivated plant
– or most cultivated things in fact. In
the late 1960s the town of New Britain hired such a horde of horticultural
greenhorns and turned us loose on the overgrown and out-of-control savannah
with instructions to “rip everything out!”
(Unfortunately in the midst of “everything” was a hefty supply of poison
ivy, which some of us discovered we were quite allergic to – but that is
another story for another day.)

At the time I
did not know anything about Frederick Law Olmstead. But, after leaving our path of destruction on
the terrain, I was totally convinced that now I knew everything I needed to
know about garden landscaping.

Fast-forward
to today and I am still applying the knowledge that I garnered in the backwoods
of Walnut Hill Park to the perennial gardens of our own open space. So how much did I actually learn from my
hands-on experience with the Father of American Landscape Architecture’s
handiwork?

Phrased a
little more eloquently than my original marching orders, here are Olmstead’s
Design Principles as presented by the National Association of Olmstead
Parks. (Hey, there are only six of them. How hard can this be anyway?)

“(1) A Genius
of Place: The design should take advantage of unique characteristics of the
site, even its disadvantages. The
design should be developed and refined with intimate knowledge of the site.” (In other words – plant whatever you have
wherever you have room.)

“(2) Unified
Composition: All elements of the landscape design should be made subordinate to
an overarching design purpose.” (Each of
our perennial beds has an “overarching design purpose” – “New Mexico bed”, “butterfly garden”,
etc. And all of these raison d'êtres
were carefully retrofitted onto each section after the fact. The gardens themselves were “designed” by
randomly fitting in plants that we had been given, or bought, or rescued from
abandoned gardens, into whatever space was available at the time. See Rule number 1.)

“(3)
Orchestration of Movement: The composition should subtly direct movement
through the landscape.” (Like those
Goose Neck Loosetrife and Japanese Lanterns that wander aimlessly from area to
area.)

“(4) Orchestration
of Use: The composition should artfully insert a variety of uses into logical
precincts, ensuring the best possible site for each use and preventing
competition between uses.” (There is no
“competition between uses” in our gardens – whatever the hell that means. Just competition for survival.)

“(5)
Sustainable Design and Environmental Conservation: Plant materials should
thrive, be non invasive, and require little maintenance.” (But a little invasiveness is like a stick
shift on a car – it makes you feel needed.)

“(6) A
Comprehensive Approach: The composition should be comprehensive and seek to
have a healthful influence beyond its boundaries.” (And that’s where I, aka The Border Patrol,
play my oh, so necessary role.)

It occurs to
me that the reason Frederick Law Olmstead was able to design so many parks,
cemeteries, and gardens in so many different locations is that he never really
hung around to pick up after himself.
It’s a luxury that we more down-to earth gardeners simply do not have.